Project Vision 21

Francisco Miraval

I met Marcela (not her real name) at a recent community event. We just happened to sit around the same table and, perhaps to fulfill the unwritten rules of social etiquette, we exchange the usual greetings and our names.

A few minutes later, for reasons still unclear to me, Marcela began to tell me about her personal life, a life with unthinkable tragedies and with just a few (very few, indeed) rays of hope. Neither the face nor the voice of Marcela anticipated what she was about to tell me.

It is not necessary to go into details. I will just say that Marcela was first forced to leave her college studies and then her country. She came to the United States without proper documentation, escaping from a life of such violence that in just 12 months 17 people close to her were murdered.

After several years here, Marcela is now legally in the country, but she still lacks permanent residence. Therefore, it is difficult for her to find a job, to go back to college, and to access the resources she desperately needs “just to survive,” as she told me.

With good, but still limited English, with the past still haunting her, far away from her family and with few friends here, Marcela confessed that there were times when she was forced to do things she didn’t want to do “just to survive,” she repeated.

Eventually, the activities of the community meeting continued and the conversation ended. Walking away and looking at met, Marcela said something totally unexpected: “You are the first person in 16 years of facing my problems who treated me with respect. You didn’t judge me.”

Why should I judge her? I thought. I couldn’t believe what she just told me, so I asked her: “How is it possible that during 16 years of conversations about your life nobody respected you?” I didn’t get any answer, just a smile revealing both gratitude and sadness.

Marcela’s statement (which I still can’t accept) immediately reminded me of something Ahab says in “The Devil and Miss Prym,” by Paulo Coelho: “You weren’t afraid of me and you didn’t judge me. For the first time ever someone (trusts) that I could be a good man.”

Certainly, I am not and I don’t pretend to be Saint Savin. I don’t live (like him) in a cave. Also, I don’t think my conversations transform people as deeply as Savin did with Ahab. But I can’t believe that somebody shared many times her 16 years of struggles and tragedies without receiving a minimum of respect.

Perhaps Marcela says the same thing to everybody. Perhaps she just wanted to make me feel better. Perhaps that’s her strategy. Or perhaps it is true that nobody take her or her stories seriously because of her look, her past, and her present.

In a sense, we are all Marcela, with stories to tell that nobody wants to listen just because we are the ones telling the stories.